As computing systems have come to permeate, and often dominate, both the business world and the consumer world, fewer and fewer documents are circulated, and read/reviewed by a receiver, in a printed or “hard-copy” format. The advent of smaller, and therefore more portable, computing systems, and more sophisticated display devices, has also contributed significantly to this rapid demise of the hard-copy document. In addition, environmental concerns and operational costs, have also led businesses, and individuals, to take measures to minimize paper use. As a result, it is relatively clear that very soon, if it has not already happened, electronic media based documents and text will become the undeniable standard and paper-based documents may well become a thing of the past.
Indeed, the prevalence of electronic media based documents has already extended well beyond the business world into the consumer market as evidenced by the popularity of digital books, including leisure reading, scholastic textbooks, and numerous work/study and professional related texts. In addition, the Internet, and electronic media based news reporting/articles, has already overtaken traditional newspapers as the primary source of printed information for arguably a majority of individuals in the Western World, and certainly for those individuals under the age of 30.
The emergence of electronic media based documents as the dominant text format presents numerous opportunities to manipulate and leverage the digital data nature of electronic media based documents in a way that was impossible with hard-copy based documents. However, currently, many processing opportunities presented by the digital data nature of electronic media based documents have yet to be realized in any tangible way, or at least in a tangible way that is user friendly. Consequently, while electronic media based documents are indeed rapidly becoming the standard, these documents are currently treated, and used, as merely more portable, easily circulated, and convenient versions of their hard-copy counterparts. As a result, currently, the potential of electronic media based documents to provide a significantly enhanced user/reader experience is often not realized.
For instance, if a user/reader of a currently available electronic media based document does not understand a given word presented in an electronic media based document, the user/reader currently must: leave the document, and the context of the word's use; write down or memorize the word, and its spelling; then go to either a hard-copy dictionary, or to an un-related Internet site or database; look up the definition of the word, and hope it is the correct definition for the context of the word's usage in the document; and then, finally return to the document for further reading with the definition hopefully still fresh in the user's mind. This process is not significantly different than the process used for the past four or five hundred years with written and/or printed documents.
The situation discussed above, represents not only an extremely inefficient use of the reader's time, it also takes the reader, and the word, outside of the context of the document, creates an opportunity to introduce error and incorrect meanings of a word for the context of it's use, and, in many cases, the process must be repeated again at some future date when the reader forgets the definition of the word.